Stronger Than Ever.

Byline: MARK HOLGATE editor: Sally Singer

The house of Thierry Mugler, home to the powerful, body-sculpted, glamazon Valkyrie, is back with a new designer and a new face--Naomi Watts.

For one of her first official duties as ambassador for the Thierry Mugler perfume Angel, Naomi Watts arrived at this year's Met Costume Institute gala wearing a Mugler dress inspired by a 1994 design. Given that she was turning up for the opening of the "Superheroes" exhibit, the timing couldn't have been better. At the zenith of the French designer's career, back in the eighties, he never met a superwoman he didn't like. Mugler pioneered a strong, sculptural, sci-fi silhouette, encasing his heroine in armor-tough suits and molded evening dresses--Paris chic by way of planet Krypton. That evening, Watts was dressed in pleated white silk chiffon that fluttered to the floor, but that was all that was soft about it. The shape was resolutely hourglass, the diaphanous fabric concealing the incredible feat of engineering that lay beneath. "I felt more womanly than ever before," Watts says, "yet also much more together. I didn't feel there was a bad angle to that dress. The neckline, the arrangement of the pleats . . . it was exquisite because it was so well thought out."

Watts wasn't the only one to notice how well executed her dress was. Young designers--many of whom would have been in diapers when Mugler was staging wild runway shows that had supermodels cavorting in metallic robotica, fetish leather, and corsets styled to look like motorbikes, complete with wing mirrors--lined up to pay homage to Watts's dress. "Zac Posen was so excited," she says. "He kept saying, 'You're in Thierry Mugler!' " And that's not the only payment of respect that has been going on. The designer might have disappeared off fashion's radar in the nineties, the era of minimalism and logomania, but there are plenty of Muglerisms around this fall, what with curvy neoprene cocktail dresses, sculpted wool-felt coats, and monumental, gleaming metal jewelry. Yet now, with the launch of Thierry Mugler Edition, you can feel empowered by the real thing.

Thierry Mugler Edition comprises 35 limited-edition pieces sourced from the archives, then updated by the label's artistic director, Rosemary Rodriguez. (Mugler is no longer involved with the fashion house that bears his name, although he is still involved in the perfume; instead, he has been designing stage costumes, such as Joey Arias's in Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.) Rodriguez worked for the designer for a few years in the mid-nineties before going on to spend five years designing Paco Rabanne, so it's fair to say she knows a thing or two about glacial, ...